@Servase: I agree a remote is faster... my point being (to the appliance makers) don't make things unnecessarily complex. If so many features are crammed into a remote and consumers are expected to 'learn' and adapt to those, then keep those expectations low! As Duane comments below, a good majority could not set the clock on their VCRs!
Gesture and speech-based control today is still primitive. Give it time, they will improve to the point of getting rid of remotes.
I hope I live long enough to have a holodeck in my house -that would be truly an immersive experience!
MP Divakar

Sometimes I wonder if the manufacturers consider the majority buyer when decking out TVs with all of these features. The audience of EE-Times may appreciate web access, apps and a remote with a full keyboard on it. In the context of consumer electronics, however, "smart" should mean the the device is smart, not that the user has to be smart.
When VCRs (video cassette recorders for you youngsters) were in every house, the running joke was that no one could program them and most of them spent their days with "12:00" blinking on the front panel, indicating that the clock hadn't even been set.
With a user interface track record like that, I don't expect so called "smart" TV's to gain any more acceptance than 3D TVs have.

Uggh, just uggh. Until these smart TV's have i3's embedded and run XBMC as the default I'm just not interested.
Gesture and voice control? A remote is faster, more accurate and a hell of a lot easier for me to program.
Streamed gaming services are interesting but my Steam account is better.
I have a smart TV now and the only time I use the "smart" features is when I press the wrong button on my Harmony remote.

My question to LG Electronics' CTO Scott Ahn (who says “Smart TVs have many smart features. But the way consumers interact with SmartTV isn’t smart.”) would be: why not get rid of the remote for SmartTV altogether? If your TV is so smart, has built-in camera, why not implement gesture-based and speech-based commands? While you are there, implement facial recognition so I can train my SmartTV to differentiate my commands to those of my kids.
MP Divakar

I have an Xbox, Samsung Smart TV and an Apple TV box. I work abroad and rely on a broadband connection to view TV programs.
I find all these devices are too limited in what you can watch.
Xbox have the right idea with its 24 hour baseball channel but so far that's about it. There are hardly any stations allowing access through the Smart TV.

Perhaps I misunderstand what the word "platforms" referred to, in the quote.
I took it to mean the smart TVs themselves. If, instead, it refers to Web sites that aggregate TV content, like Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, YouTube, the cable and satellite companies themselves, and a long list of other more obscure sites that already exist, then I would agree.
Just making the point that there is no lack of content aggregation on the Internet already. So there's no reason to make it sound like this still neeeds to happen.